more than 3,000,000 tons of raw sugar per year, and in addition imports
manufactured sugar to the value of Es. 15 crores, yet the value of the
sugar machinery imported was only a little over Es. 4J lakhs. Similarly,
oil seeds worth nearly Es. 25 crores were exported ; but oil-crushing and
refining plant to the value of only Es. 3 lakhs was imported. With
paper and pasteboard imports worth Es. 160 lakhs, paper-mill machinery
and plant worth only Es. 3-J- lakhs were imported. These figures are signi-
ficant of the exiguity of the efforts hitherto made in India to replace
imported articles by the manufacture of indigenous raw materials. On
the other hand, the very large value of the imports of machinery for the
textile industry is due to the entire absence in India of any engineering
works capable of supplying her needs, and the consequent reliance on
overseas sources for this all-essential need of our largest existing industry.
The direction of Indian industrial development has been thus predeter-
mined by the existence of a large export trade in raw materials, and by
the ease with which most classes of manufactured articles could be
imported from abroad. Other factors arising to some extent out of this
general tendency, have helped to restrict Indian industrial progress in
the past to an incomplete and limited development along the lines already
indicated.
77. Where money has been invested in industries, it has generally
Shyness of capital for keen confined to a few simple and safe enter-
modern enterprises prises of an obviously attractive nature, whilst
generally. equally important minor industries have been
almost entirely neglected, partly through ignorance of the country's
resources in raw materials, but mainly because commercial firms have
prospered too well along conservative and stereotyped lines to trouble
about undeveloped industries with uncertain prospects. Before the war,
they could always be sure of importing all necessary stores and machinery
of assured and regular quality, and they have naturally preferred a safe
profit from trade, or from such established industries as jute and cotton
manufacture, to a doubtful return from such ventures as metallurgical
and chemical manufactures^ Another contributory cause has been the
practice pursued by Government departments of indenting on the India
Office for miscellaneous stores, which has been to some extent due to
the absence of a stores-purchasing department in India. Government
rules intended to encourage the purchase of locally manufactured articles
have not succeeded in counteracting the tendency of indenting officers
to place on some recognised authority the responsibility for "price and
quality.
Generally speaking, the industries based on technical science have
been disregarded, because profits in other ways have been easy and
assured. The neglect of applied science is perhaps the most conspicuous
among our administrative deficiencies.
78. We have dealt in greater detail in Chapter X with the corre-
. sponding dependence of India on imported
Deflciencjs^industriai technologists and engineers. It was to this
aspect of the question, as well as to the economic